Roy Williams

And ... Maria 

I sometimes wonder (or dream) of just giving participants the title and the image, and asking them to respond: Risk (with the image of the boy 'jumping the skyline) or Tranformation (with the image of the butterfly and larva) [not 'liminality' that's too specialist]. 

This would cause more or less confusion, and make it more or less accessible? 

Risk ?

Transformation ?

Maria, very interesting -  degrees of freedom and the way you map different aspects of maths and gaming (and the overlap between the two).  Please let us know how you get on with adapting the footprint metaphors in your math ed communities. 

How do you approach the movement of math ed participants across different degrees of freedom, and abstraction, and how do you (and the participants) work with the homologies between maths and gaming? Gaming is embodied (or vitrually embodied) algorithms, no?  Or is there also a homology between algorithms and programming in gaming? 

And the fractal of hands is quite disconcerting. We might use it as an icon sometime - with you permission. 

And ... time, paticularly when it is short - does that engage participants in new ways?  I am particularly interested in the link (and transition) between embodied, intuitive engagement (/learning) virtually embodied learning, and abstract learning.  We have a follow up paper dealing with some of these issues, with some links to emergent learning coming out in Leonardo journal next year - see the abstract here ... 

Nick, wonderful, thank you so much.  Critique, paricularly from 'outside' our own 'echo chambers' is refreshing.  By definition, we have little or no 'outside' perspective available to us, personally, any more as we have been working on this for far too long. 

So ...

• It started, and progressed, I guess, as a research tool, from the inside. It shows, you are quite right. (As researchers, that does not matter, as members of a community of users 'of learning' it does - a difficult paradox). 
• This was not funded, it was done in the time we could find, or steal, between the demands of our day jobs This was good because it gave us freedom from delivering the goods to funders (we have published a lot, so I suppose we had to deliver to the journals, but IRRODL and NLC (amongst others) have been very supportive. More recently we have bumped up against the 'big data' / instructivist /xMOOC / 'physics envy' lobby, and have had a few refusals, including a refusal from our first funding application! mmmmmm ....
• A whole new literacy - exactly.  I often think about doing a meta-mindmap of the factors and clusters - literally, placing the palette in the centre of the mind-map, and drawing in the miriad links to the researchers whose shoulders we are standing on - but that would probably make it even more complicated, and more of a challenge for a whole new 'meta-literacy'.  Aaaaaaggh!
• Question: how far can one go in developing new tools, without losing most of your audience in the process?  Food for thought. This is very new, taken as a whole, but it is also very old, and builds, for example, on some central ideas and experience that we got from Montessori pre-schools, many years ago, and that she developed more than 100 years ago now. That doesn't answer the 'user friendly question though, I know. 
• Question: Is this an 'app', and should it be an app that can be downloaded and used in the first 5 minutes, or is it a new tool that requires two webinars and two weeks of discussion to use?
• Based quite largely on the experience of running these webinars and forums in SCoPE (the first time we have attempted it fully online), I am tempted to 'package' it as a two-week engagement event - I think we might have been over-ambitious in trying to do it in 60 or 120 minute workshops before, but hey, that's also a learning experience for us. For me, this 14 day format (for participants, and for us) looks about right, though I must say that we have had some seriously useful and positive responses from quite a few people (in education, admittedly, but some of them were students without too much research experience).  
• We would seriously like to make it more interactive, which might (?) make it more user friendly. 
• But ... should we / can we ... still demand of our users that they do some work on a new literacy first?  
• I am reminded of the 20 years I spent trying to convince my brother (otherwise quite intelligent, he was a fellow of an Oxford college) of the sense of post-modernism - he finally got the point when someone said "for example, you have to be able to see the dog as text ...".  I sometimes wonder if it will take another 20 years to convince people of the 'sense' of complexity theory (which we try to avoid, and just talk of 'emergence' instead - dont know if that works). 

Any thoughts/ suggestions?  We would love to find some 'get out of the tower' cards / ideas.  Cutting the list down from 24 or 25 is one idea we have considered, but rejected - so far. 

Thank you again - these are crucial issues, and not 'external' to the debate at all - though of course your 'external' vantage point gives you an advantage! 

Phillip, key texts / ideas from Clancy or Shaw?  Tell me more, please.  I agree that emergence is forever iterative, and have written extensively on affordances in much the same light (see here ... ).

Horticulture is possibly more 'hands on', but I take my cue from Montessori education, in which 'hands off' (and silent demonstration) are key. So a mashup of the two, perhaps. 

I had not realised that Lamark forumulated the idea of evolution pushing biology 'up the chain' of complexity, and in effect countering the hegemony of physics, and the widespread epidemic of 'physics envy' that is still prevalent in social science, and in learning research.  The misapplication of the second law of themodynamics has a lot to answer for. 

I'll join you in the red wine conversation - always a useful prop to have for emergent learning. 

Design - sure, I only realised recently (perhaps I should have read more Kant, and less Barthes) that the discouse of design is largely colonised by people who see it as something that ends before the learning starts. Emegent learning, emergent design, co-evolution of structure and agency, or should we just say co-evolution of design and learning - that feels much better to me, maybe we should change the name of the first quadrant to that Design/Learning? 

Jaap, many thanks.  I agree, translating is a great way to explore and share meaning-in-multiple-contexts.

I will respond later in more detail - just to say I love 'soepel' as a component of ambiguity - could even be a replacement for ambiguity in Dutch, thought I dont think supple would work in English (and I'm constantly cross-referencing this to Afrikaans, which I know quite well). 

Translation as "trying to read the wind?"  - which is a supple / subtle skill, no?